'Pokémon GO' Update: Yes, It Looks Like Legendary Pokémon Are Coming To The Game This Weekend

Dave Thier
, ContributorI write about video games and technology.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Credit: The Pokemon Company

From the reveal trailer for Pokemon GO.

Pokémon GO got a new update last night, and there's more to it than meets the eye here. On the surface, it revolves around the continual effort to streamline the gym system, in this case by adding the ability to feed berries to defending Pokémon remotely, as well as to feed berries to allied Pokémon even if they're already sated, tired and bloated from an endless supply of Nanab berries. For anyone looking forward to this weekend, however, it's the hidden features in the app that make the biggest difference. The good folks at Silph Road did their usual teardown of the new update, confirming what we all suspected when we got the update last night: there are numerous references to Legendary Pokémon here. As usual, we are still short of official confirmation, but I think we can say with relative confidence that Legendaries will be arriving in Pokémon GO at Pokémon GO Fest this weekend.

You can read up on the full datamine here, but essentially we've got various new indicators inside the app that will be used to govern how Legendary Pokémon operate. First, there's a basic identifier, saying whether or not a Pokémon is Legendary or Mythic. There's also a warning message about transferring a Legendary, an error message that prevents you from deploying a Legendary to a Gym (interesting on its own, that one), an identifier to say whether or not a raid is Legendary and a few new assets related to those Legendary Raids. All in all, Silph Road suspects that there's enough currently in the app to ready the game for server-side activation.

A Silph Road notes, this is all still speculation. Various game features have arrived in the app long before they were actually implemented in-game after all, and theoretically, that's what could be happening here. Still, the circumstantial evidence is getting pretty overwhelming at this point. We have developers talking about how legendaries were coming this summer, we have this "mystery challenge" at Pokémon GO Fest, we have the just-released gameplay vehicle in the form of raids, we have the timing of this update, etc. At this point, this is what the community expects, and it would be a gigantic letdown if raids didn't arrive in-game during Pokémon GO Fest.

Here's how it will likely go down. After a series of limited time events during Pokémon GO Fest, players will theoretically unlock a new "mystery challenge" during the event. This will give the players in Chicago the opportunity to battle in their first Legendary Raids: with such a high concentration of top-level players, they're bound to go down pretty quickly. After that, success in those raids will unlock Legendary Raids for players worldwide. It seems that Legendary Raid Passes will also be handled differently than normal Raid Passes, but it isn't yet clear how that will work specifically.

Stay tuned. We've been waiting for Legendary Pokemon since launch, and I'm more than curious to say how it's going to be implemented.